If We Remember How Unity Feels, We Can Save Democracy

It only takes 10% of your time to inspire change

The year I turned 10, Ireland had two general elections. Every day after school, a bunch of us walked the town, leafleting and running errands for canvassers. We were fearless. We owned the place. Think Lyra Belacqua racing round an Oxford no adult even suspects exists. No one who’s been awarded the official freedom of a city has ever felt daily liberty as we did.

A few years later, canvassing with my mum in an outlying village, a door was opened by someone I’d last seen leading a cackle of girls who stood jeering as I lay on the schoolyard. I’d only fallen over—they were toughs, not bullies. But when those girls hadn’t returned to school the summer they turned 15, nobody wept. On the doorstep, we clocked each other instantly. I hesitated. She grinned. We peeled off for a chat, like we’d always been friends. Turns out her family were in the same political party as mine. So now I wasn’t a clumsy, four-eyed doctor’s daughter; I was a comrade in arms.

Today, I live in a country that wants people to have just one identity. You can’t be British and international, they say; that makes you a “citizen of nowhere.” You can’t feel security or pride as a hyphenated hybrid; you’re just an immigrant, barely tolerated, and if you don’t…